Highlights
One More Voice
This project is a satellite project of One More Voice. As such, this project aims to further the goal of One More Voice to “recover non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives” (Wisnicki).
Narrow Focus
As part of this recovery work, this project aims to shine greater light on Sui Sin Far and her work in particular through its narrower focus. The narrower focus of this project is also meant to foster increased conversation of Sui Sin Far’s contributions.
New Considerations
This project also aims to bring forth a consideration of the importance of sound in the study of texts. Here, there is currently a focus on songs referenced in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and recordings of these songs have been made available.
Full Statement
As a satellite project of One More Voice, this digital humanities project aims to further the goals of One More Voice to “recover non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives” [1]. In our attempt to further and expand on this central goal, we chose an author recovered by One More Voice, Sui Sin Far, and chose to devote this project to her and her work.
By nature, the One More Voice project cannot provide as much information or resources for a singular author as a project devoted to that one author; One More Voice is meant to be a resource for recovering many authors whose contributions have gone under-represented or unrecognized in the dominate literature and discussions. In an attempt to shine more light on Sui Sin Far, this project has made her its focus and has provided more biological information about her than is provided on One More Voice. Furthermore, this project currently focuses on one of her later works, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, which is a collection of many of her short stories. This text was chosen as a representative work due to its being a collection of many of her works over the entirety of her career and its being published towards the end of her career. The narrower focus of this project allows it to approach the goals of the One More Voice project from a different direction. While One More Voice is broad and expansive in its attempt to recover voices from the British colonial archive, this project aims to shine a brighter light on one of those recovered voices and encourage people to bring that voice into conversation.
The other goal of this project is to consider new ways of studying texts. Throughout history, texts have often been studied with literary or historical contexts in mind. However, an encounter with Sound Never Tasted So Good (link opens in new tab) made me consider the importance of sound in various situations [2]. Thinking about the importance of sound in the context of eating friendly meals, I wondered if sound is not also important within texts. As I have not come across much scholarship discussing sound within texts, I decided to attempt an exploration of the importance of sound in texts as part of this project. The start of this endeavor has been to identify songs referenced in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and provide a recording of the melody on this website. It is my hope that providing these recordings will prompt scholars to think more about the importance of sound in text, and begin a discourse on the topic, perhaps beginning with the work of Sui Sin Far.
Works Cited
- Wisnicki, Adrian S., with Heather F. Ball, Jared McDonald, and Mary Borgo Ton. Introduction. One More Voice (an imprint of Livingstone Online), new dawn edition, 2021, https://onemorevoice.org (link opens in new tab).
- Ceraso, Steph. Sound Never Tasted So Good: “Teaching” Sensory Rhetorics. Lexington, Intermezzo, 2019, https://manifold.as.uky.edu/projects/sound-never-tasted-so-good (link opens in new tab).
Sui Sin Far 